When restaurants and cafes in Portland and elsewhere link into networks of food pantries and soup kitchens, will mutual aid feel real in the US? When regular folks come out of their houses to shame and chase ICE thugs out of the neighborhood, will that feeling of power from below catch on? Will it create some craving for a different way of doing things and understanding authority and order?
Derek looks at Portland, Julian looks at street resistance, and Matthew unpacks the old anarchist idea of mutual aid, and whether and how it intersects with our time and what’s left of our institutions.
Show Notes
Here are 18 Portland-area coffee shops and restaurants that have pledged to feed people who lose SNAP benefits
Angie Vargas, ICE Chaser
LAHoodLove on Instagram
BraveNewFilms on Instagram
Kat Abughazaleh in Mother Jones
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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And as we are recording this on Tuesday, we just have to say RIP to Dick Cheney.
And it's the type of day that really makes me wish I was religious so I believed in hell.
I can do that for you.
I can be the guy who believes that he's in hell on behalf of both of you.
Thank you.
Thank you for that empathy.
I'll make a space for him in my mental version of hell for you both.
Yeah.
I will live vicariously through that.
Yeah.
Conspirituality 282, mutual aid against ICE.
When restaurants and cafes in Portland and elsewhere link into networks of food pantries and soup kitchens, will mutual aid feel real in the U.S.?
When regular folks come out of their houses to shame and chase ICE thugs out of the neighborhood, will that feeling of power from below catch on?
Will it create some craving for a different way of doing things and understanding authority and order?
Derek looks at Portland today.
I'll be looking at street resistance around the country, and Matthew unpacks the old anarchist idea of mutual aid and whether and how it intersects with our time and what's left of our institutions.
See, this is why taxpayers are fed up.
It's not about people who genuinely need supplemental nutrition assistance.
It's about people like this spouting off about what they deserve while working families are clipping coupons.
You know who loves the fact that you're making these videos and fixating so much on poor people and what they eat?
So weirdly obsessed with how they spend their $7 a day in average snap benefits?
Billionaires and people in power, especially those that cater to billionaires and the top 1%, you are doing so much free labor for them.
That's Dr. Jessica Nurek, one of my favorite follows on social media.
And she was responding to something I've seen too much of in right-wing and wellness spaces.
Those damn entitlements, like, you know, wanting to feed your family every day when you don't have the means to afford it in a nation where a host of tech bros are madly rushing to become the world's first trillionaire.
Side note, I'll be doing a live Conspirituality podcast recording with Jessica at the Unimonia Summit next week in Florida, and I'll eventually release it on the feed once the organizers send those files.
I'm very excited for that.
Although I just found out that if the government shutdown continues next week, the government is going to be closing parts of our American airspace.
So let's see if I even make it to Florida at this point.
So speaking of dysfunctional governments, let's keep going.
Jessica in that clip is citing something that's been very common on the right since Reagan.
And while the ideology predates him, old Ronnie really nailed the sentiment in 1976 when he repeatedly told the story of a supposed welfare queen who allegedly and repeatedly defrauded the welfare system, ruining the safety net for all of those hardworking cowboys.
The story is an exaggeration of a woman named Linda Taylor, and she really did defraud the government along with other possible crimes like bigamy and murder.
She also presented herself as black and Asian and Hispanic and Jewish throughout her life.
She was quite a trip, but the story Reagan told quickly became mythologized in Republican lore.
And the stereotype of black women abusing American taxpayers has been with us ever since.
Yeah, the stereotype is this form of racist violence.
And I also think it has this really broad cultural purchase in a country with a lot of like wasp and Calvinist productivity and shame feelings running really deep.
Like I think one of the most effective ways of shutting down any debate over socializing the necessities of life is to instill this deep fear of being accused of stealing or freeloading or harming others by asking for the basics.
You know, and if you have that going for a few generations or for 100 years, that can really suppress any instinct that would go in the other direction, which is to recognize that it's shameful to not socialize the necessities.
Like it's upside down.
Well, that's because the right really hate safety nets or what they term takers who, and I wish I was kidding, exploit billionaires.
That is basically the narrative that is happening in the modern Republican Party.
I mean, they present it as exploiting everyday Americans, but given that SNAP benefits just ran out for 42 million Americans this weekend due to the ongoing government shutdown, I would say those are everyday Americans who are being actually exploited.
And still, as Jessica notes in that video, a certain class of Americans not on SNAP have nothing better to do than yell at people about whether or not they need it or even try to understand their circumstances.
They just literally invent their own welfare queens in their head.
Yeah, I mean, it's usually those, as you two have been highlighting, who were born into some kind of privilege or who got really lucky, who want to call those who weren't lazy.
And the thing I find even more upsetting is lower income people and second generation immigrants who've bought into this divisive propaganda and then shut the door behind them.
Well, how would you characterize that propaganda, Julianne?
I mean, I feel like it's this political messaging in the water that draws a dividing line between immigrants who became proud citizens.
Maybe they were born here, but their parents jumped the fence, or maybe their parents came here quote unquote the right way.
And then those other bad, illegal immigrants.
And same thing with poverty.
Like lower income people who don't ask for a handout, and very often it's going to be white people who adopt this stance, can be persuaded to feel superior to people who rely on benefits.
And so instead of solidarity with their actual compatriots, there's this push towards identifying with the ruling class.
So there's a sense in which like folks are offered a promise, but they're also conditioned to believe that they earned it and that somehow those who follow them might not meet the mark.
Yeah, I mean, that's the American dream, right?
Is that if everyone, anyone, wherever they're starting from, if they work hard enough and they have the correct moral fiber, they can become wealthy.
And so if that's not happening, it's your own damn fault.
I guess that the goalposts are always changing too with regard to who meets those marks, right?
They're very subjective.
Well, I know people who've spent over a decade becoming citizens and they actually tend to veer conservative on this issue because they spent tens of thousands of dollars and years of their life going through that process.
And then you get the propaganda on the right and they see that.
And then they're like, well, these people shouldn't just be here after I spent all of this money and time.
So it is tricky because they've had a lived experience of really doing a lot to become a citizen.
Yeah.
And that kind of resentment can easily feed into weaponized.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's this odd kind of human emotion that I've always noticed and always kind of scratched my head about, which says, you know, people who are in a much, much less fortunate position, like refugees, for example, who are not able to do the types, to take the path that I took to gain some kind of privilege, they're somehow cheating, right?
In a way that I wasn't able to.
So fuck them.
Yeah, they don't deserve to be, they don't naturally deserve to be in the same blessed land that I've found myself in.
Or there's some kind of, but I think you're pointing to something very uncomfortable, which is like a loss of memory or a feeling that somehow, you know, your conditions or your essence has totally changed or something like that.
I don't know if I found myself in would be the way to phrase it, just because like these are people whose families specifically came here for certain reasons and certain ideals.
Yeah.
Right.
There's a lot of crossover with that crowd and those who are celebrating the fact that some states have removed candy and soda from SNAP without any sign they're replacing it with the whole fruits and vegetables that RFK Jr. promised.
This is Maha sleight of hand.
And it's why the platform of Maha is a marketing opportunity run by people with no interest in policies or governing, at least not in the ways that would help those 42 million Americans.
Kennedy has called the removal of food dyes, soda, and seed oils Maha wins, yet he's never said anything about all those people going hungry at best.
And I just was on his Twitter feed before we recorded.
He was doing it today.
He's blaming the Democrats for the shutdown, which is an absolute farce.
I mean, they are keeping it shut down, but that is because of healthcare, which Kennedy is supposed to be in charge of.
So what are we to do?
I want to share a good news story for a change because there's so little of them right now, at least coming from major news outlets.
On the ground, things are very different.
About two weeks ago, one of my local coffee spots here in Portland is a nonprofit volunteer-run shop called Heretic Coffee.
And they posted that they were going to feed SNAP recipients breakfast for as long as their benefits were cut off.
A couple days later, they included a donation link to help the effort.
And now over a weekend, they've raised over $310,000.
That's amazing.
I'm not sure if they were the first to do this, but numerous local restaurants, almost all small businesses, although there's been some chains like Burgerville who have stepped in, they have stepped up to offer similar programs.
The Oregonian published a list of them.
There were four, then eight, then 18.
They keep adding to it as they learn about more shops.
I'll share that link in the show notes.
You have donuts, loaves of breads, burritos, Chinese food.
There's a taqueria and anime cafe, which is the new thing here in Portland.
There's a Knob Hill bar, the Texas barbecue.
Back to Heretic.
It was founded by Josh White, who's a humanitarian journalist who was raised in a low-income household that needed benefits.
Heretic is actually part of his personal mission.
As I said, it's volunteer-run, but they train baristas who can then go out and find employment in the industry.
And considering Portland is such a coffee city, there's usually opportunities around.
Last week on threads, he wrote, We've said it before and we'll say it again.
When the system fails us, it's on everyday people to take care of each other.
This right here is the proof.
From the bottom of my heart and all of our volunteers at Heretic, thank you.
Portland will keep you fed for as long as we possibly can.
I just got to say, maybe it's the language and baristas, but like they train baristas has this very Portland, but also militaristic sound to it, actually.
Baristas who are going out into the jungles who will, I don't know.
They're keeping all the protesters caffeinated.
Right, right.
And they're planning their coup.
So this is quite a different image from the war right-wing influencers are trying to pretend exists here in Portland.
I've loved all the cities I've lived in, and there are communities everywhere, but Portland really does try to cultivate the sense that the city itself is one.
And so many small business owners are proving it right now.
And this is especially important in a state where 775,000 residents saw disruptions or outright lost their SNAP benefits this week.
That's 18% of the state's population.
In Multnomah County, where Portland is, 143,000 residents were predicted to lose their SNAP benefits.
The average monthly benefit, I mean, they're printing money, man.
It's $300 a month here.
That's per family.
Now, the state does have its own benefit program called Snap Ed, yet their annual budget is $9.5 million, whereas the total benefits needed to feed every SNAP recipient in the state exceeds 2.5 billion.
So the federal cuts are really making a deep impact.
Yeah, the numbers are incredible and really show that, you know, mutual aid versus the power of like the state is really David and Goliath until David gets bigger, David gets braver, you know, David wins.
Yeah, I mean, I think we're all sort of grappling with the puzzle of how to win.
David wins, but what is lost in the process?
People will go hungry.
There could be terrible health outcomes towards it.
So hopefully over the long term, yes, but there's going to be a lot of short-term pain.
And who knows as it drags on, especially since this weekend, a court blocked the uh blocked Trump from stopping funding of SNAP.
And then just yesterday, Monday, the government announced they were going to reinstitute SNAP at 50% and it would be delayed for weeks so the people wouldn't see it.
So that's weeks without their benefits of getting food.
And then just this morning or overnight, because he's always up, Trump posted, fuck that.
We are not giving SNAP.
We're not doing it because the Democrats.
Oh, I didn't see that.
Yeah, that just happened before we recorded.
Oh, so they, so we clawed that back.
So, so, so there was a, there was a court order to to stop the freezing of funds.
He said, okay, well, we'll do 50%.
And then he canceled that.
Correct.
And even 50% is bullshit because the court order said you have to give all of it.
Yeah.
And so who knows, who knows?
But either, either way, as of now, we're four days in and people's cards aren't being reloaded.
Yeah, he thinks that he's in a business negotiation with a court, right?
Like that's what he's doing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I don't know how that works.
I do know I mentioned Oregon, but a number of states are trying to fill in gaps and businesses are trying to fill in gaps.
But 775,000 people, you can't fill all those gaps given what we're up against right now.
So it's a fucking shame.
It's not like we Americans, all Americans have stopped paying taxes.
Congress people are getting their paychecks.
ICE agents are getting their paychecks and we are funding that.
Yet our hard-earned money isn't going to help the people who need it most right now.
And on top of that, we're coming out to donate more of our already taxed money to help the people who should be taken care of through our taxes in the first place.
Yeah, wait a minute.
Now, Heretic is not offering you like tax deductions on your donations to shore up the lack of SNAP benefits, right?
They are a nonprofit, but when I donated and my wife donated, we didn't see any forms.
I mean, I don't even know.
And I don't even, I don't even care.
Like, I know, but they are, I don't know how they're actually doing that, but they haven't posted information.
So yeah, yeah, that's taxed money that we're then donating on top of it.
One day we're all going to wake up and realize we're fucked if the government, if the Republican bill passes and the government reopens because premiums for anyone on the ACA are set to rise up to 30% next year.
And that's just the average.
That might be the median because when I posted that on her Instagram, people told stories of their premiums rising 600%, 1,000%.
I've seen news reports of 2,000%.
One woman replied saying she was paying $80 a month with a $16,000 deductible, which is fucking absurd in the first place for her health benefits.
And now her health benefits are going up to $1,200 a month with the same deductible.
Like you can't do that.
And that is what is at stake right now.
It's all unsustainable.
And the safety nets the Republicans are laser focused on removing can't possibly hold the weight of the millions more who are going to need assistance soon.
So it's a fucking tragedy, but it is also beautiful seeing so many people come out to do what they can.
And that is what community is about and mutual aid is about.
And as long as we still have that, there is some level of hope.
Yeah, I love this story, the restaurant, the coffee shop story.
Like it really echoes as well the last major moment of solidarity and crisis.
I think in our memory, recent memory during the pandemic, during those first few waves in which like neighbors did grocery runs for each other, you know, work became more online and more flexible.
And we knew too that the periods of decreased in real life contact and mobility drove some people into rabbit holes that we spent five years trying to unpack.
But there was also this huge amount of new cooperative networking going on.
And I think threads of that last in cultural memory.
It's really important that we keep these things alive.
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Given my algorithm these days, odds are strong when I open Instagram.
One of the first videos I see will show ICE stormtroopers slamming a screaming mother to the ground to handcuff her in front of her kids or abducting someone whose spouse is insistently crying out that they're a U.S. citizen.
And then the next video might be of brave community members thwarting the quota requirements for the moment of a gang of masked thugs while hurling expletives and insults at them.
They might do this by just getting in the way, kicking aside the dropped zip ties, or repeatedly demanding that the ICE agents show their face or give their name.
Sometimes this behavior of being a collective persistent nuisance makes the Gestapo just get overwhelmed and leave.
And as disturbing as all of this is, I'm sure I'm not alone in cheering on those scrappy resistors when that's the outcome.
There's another kind of resistance happening too.
well-organized rapid response groups across the country are seeking to challenge but also to document the many illegal and unconstitutional actions of ICE while providing support and resources to families who just watched a loved one be kidnapped some of these groups are outgrowths of immigrant rights organizations that run websites and hotlines and provide crucial legal information They're mostly local and for now at least they're easy to find online.
Well, but we can't overlook the fact that Apple removed several ICE tracking and reporting apps from the app store after being pressured by the DOJ.
They argued that a shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas was grounds for removal as the gunmen had allegedly used a tracking app.
But first off, as with everything in this administration, that claim remains unsupported.
Besides, those apps are for locating ICE agents at places like Home Depot or on farmland.
Anyone can find an ICE facility using Maps or Google.
So the idea that this guy was tracking there is just utter bullshit.
And the main app, which is called ICE Block, had over a million users when it was pulled down.
So just another example of someone creating an organizing tool and the state stepping in to force a private company to do its bidding.
Yeah, these kinds of repressive alliances are certainly going to be tough to work around moving forward.
Then there are also individual citizens acting alone and posting to social media.
The Nation just published an article this week about a woman here in LA County named Angelica Vargas.
She's a mental health professional and a mother of two in the city of Downey, which is over 75% Hispanic as compared to 47% for the overall LA area.
And she's made a name for herself on TikTok as the self-described soccer mom who posts these dash cam videos chasing ICE vehicles that are trying to evade her.
She speeds up the footage because these are long chases and then adds up tempo Mexican music to the delight of her quarter million followers who all cheer her on in the comments.
So that's kind of a little bit of a lighthearted, hopeful thing.
She also confronts ICE agents directly and says in interview, when interviewed, that the combination of her privilege as a citizen, her put-together appearance, and the fact that she speaks to them in a way she describes as smart and professional relies on what she interprets as the reverse psychology of relating on their level rather than going at them with aggressive questions and insults.
So that's her approach.
Vargas uses a network of Instagram and TikTok accounts that constantly update ICE raid activity.
And for the moment, those accounts are still up.
The article in The Nation also profiles a guy named Manny who runs one such account.
It's called at LA Hood Love on Instagram, if you want to look it up, which tracks ICE activity, publishes license plate numbers and posts protest and confrontation footage.
He's also been very vocal about the LA Dodgers owner, Mark Walter's financial involvement with private prison and surveillance companies that are utilized by ICE.
So here's this proud LA activist posting, let's go blue jays and boycott dodgers.
You know what I'm really interested in with regard to the confrontation footage is the usage of the phone itself.
Like on one hand, we have Apple blocking the IceBlocker app.
On the other hand, we have this sort of in-hand personal surveillance and confrontation advice, which I think adds a high degree of like some, well, some degree of social shame, but then some premise of social accountability with regard to the agents so that like a woman with a phone,
a housewife with a phone can stand in front of an agent and hold their phone up and curse at them a blue streak and kind of hold them in stasis for a while.
And I wonder if anybody's like really studying how that works and to what extent that's becoming like a standard, almost like resistance technique that doesn't involve like actually physically pushing back.
There's something about like the space and the looking and the recording and the standing the ground, right?
Yeah, I mean, this has been a thing with police brutality for a while, right?
Where people are basically saying, I am filming right now.
I'm recording.
There's a record of this.
This is not just happening in the void, right?
Yeah.
Amongst the many brave people doing the behind the scenes human rights and legal work, there's also a pair of brothers in Chicago that I want to feature here.
They were profiled last week by an account on Instagram called Brave New Films.
Ben and Sam, that's the only identification that's given on them, are 17 and 15 years old.
And they're these homeschooled white boys who for the last month or so have been spending an average of five hours a day driving around tracking and documenting ICE arrests and assisting families.
It's kind of a whole cat and mouse game of where they're going to show up next.
We'll be there in two minutes and see if we see anything.
I already told you, you got to stay on the sidewalk.
Where you can record, but stay on the sidewalk.
Everybody get in your card and follow!
Follow them!
I woke up a Monday in September and my mom was saying, hey, ICE is in West Chicago.
We have to go.
We met up with some other patroller groups and leaders and got connected.
And then kind of since then, it's been no sleep, out all the time, just trying to find these guys.
My entire life, or at least my teenage years, I've been very checked into the news and what's happening in the world, but I've always felt kind of paralyzed in what I can actually do because I'm just a high schooler in white suburbs of Illinois.
And then I woke up to ICE in my hometown.
They say they're targeting like murders and drug dealers.
It's like, no, you're targeting the wife who's working to support the family.
You're targeting the dad who is just trying to have his family be able to live.
They're driving around, they're looking for somebody who's brown.
They jump out and they just, they grab them and then they disappear.
If we aren't there to film it, sometimes we don't get their names.
Sometimes they're just, they're just gone.
How are people okay with this?
How do they see it?
And they just accept it as reality or they're for it and they think that this is good for America.
We have such an amazing community in West Chicago and they're trying to take that from us.
Occasionally on my thread, I'll see storm chasers come up and I just always just shake my head of how you put yourself in danger.
I actually think Ben and Sam are putting themselves in more danger, but I have to give it up.
I know a lot of times people stumble across ICE raids and they start filming or give the agents grief, but coordinated effort like this is next level.
Here in Portland, ICE's presence has ramped up quite a bit and it hasn't been in the news as much, but it's actually getting worse because there have been raids in Hillsboro, which is about a half hour drive from where I am.
It's near Beaverton and also in Gresham, which borders the other side of Portland.
And as I've mentioned before, Portland itself is majority white, about 70%, but the borders have large Mexican, Korean, Chinese, and Somali neighborhoods.
And this seems to be where ICE is specifically targeting.
And I know people in those neighborhoods have been vigilant in tracking them.
They also leaked the hotels ICE agents are staying at.
And at least one has apparently been booked for the entire month.
So it seems like it's going to be continuing here.
Yeah.
I mean, it's not a new story, right?
But even just hearing these boys talk about what they're witnessing and how they're stepping in is inspiring and it's moving.
It's also so proud, too.
It's like if you, if, if this is my 17-year-old, oh my God, you know, the amount of like support or, you know, I don't know, whatever you need, kid.
Like, or, or I'm, or I'm there in the car with you.
Totally.
Talk about using your privilege.
And as part of, you should go and look at Brave New Films.
As part of that video, they also talk about how people contact them and say, hey, will you come to the courthouse?
Will you come and escort these people in and out of the courthouse because they're scared they're going to get snatched?
And there's some feeling that their privilege and the profile they're starting to develop means that ICE agents are a little bit more cautious around them.
So it's all so dystopian, these massed anonymous armed gangs who refuse to identify themselves and then drag people away without warrants.
They're seemingly able to violate people's rights with impunity.
They ram cars, they smash windows, they endanger children and babies.
They even detain citizens, which would somehow seem to be outside of their purview, but that's also part of the threat.
If you're getting in the way, right, you're going to get arrested too.
And as you said, Matthew, with regard to the phone as this sort of device of resistance, one can only hope that documenting as much of this as possible will result in investigations and prosecutions if and when we make it out of this godforsaken time.
A state militia loyal only to the executive branch without congressional oversight, recruited at least in part from the civilian population and empowered by this enormous budget, it's way beyond the domestic checks and balances of the democracy, however flawed, that did exist here just a year ago.
It also opens the door, I fear, to criminal gangs who can now masquerade as ICE agents who don't have to identify themselves in order to kidnap civilians.
And whatever debates we can have about America's flaws and foreign policy, the complexities of the Cold War, the fact remains that immigrants have historically flocked to the U.S. precisely because of both the economic opportunities and the democratic freedoms that were lacking in their countries of origin.
So it just strikes me as an incredibly sick turnaround to now have American domestic policy empowering these anonymous thugs operating outside of the law and backed by the executive branch in ways that are more characteristic of oppressive regimes, say in Iran or Russia or Venezuela, the Philippines, specifically violating the rights of immigrants who may have fled police state oppression and upon whom, especially here in California, our economy is hugely dependent.
Yeah, I mean, another word for turnaround might be boomerang, because, I mean, for those who bear the scars of American imperialism or the impacts of structural racism, like these scenes are shocking, but they're not like out of the blue.
They're not unpredictable.
Like nobody I know involved in protest movements going back over the last 20 years would be surprised that an American state is capable of this.
Yeah, that's true.
But I also think it's important to Not lose sight of the fact that the way in which these actions are different represent crucial indicators of what's happening right now.
And it's a hugely alarming turn away from due process, human rights, and of course, already imperfect, but now vanishing police accountability.
And I do think people who fled authoritarian regimes came here and did for a time feel safe from that kind of tyranny.
And I would add, often are the first people to speak out against Americans who haven't lived under such circumstances because they've seen the oppression up close.
This is sadly how the Republican Party has captured, for example, a sizable percentage of the Cuban vote in Florida.
They speak directly to them about the fears of communism rooting in America.
We can look at it from afar and scoff at what it is, but I know personally we have a close family friend whose family is not really political, but they fled Cuba a generation ago, and they are now all firmly in the MAGA camp because of that propaganda.
Yeah, I think these are all fair points.
What I personally don't have a lot of stomach for is any kind of narrative around a time like this of American domestic safety that doesn't include, you know, a couple of paradoxes.
Like one is how unsafe the country has been for many marginalized groups forever.
And secondly, how unsafe the U.S. is for the countries it has directly undermined, like through political manipulation, military coups, or trade deals, or global North climate policies that have forced migration northward, right?
Which accounts for like a number of the people who are now being deported.
Well, I think, you know, relative relativity is important here because you have Tanahishi Coates who says, we have to look at the fact that this is the best time we've ever been for black Americans.
Now, what does that scale look like?
That's not great, obviously.
But it also, like, I kind of get worried every time we're like, American imperialism, we did this, this, and this, without understanding, like Jillian said, there were due process laws in effect.
There were things that did make it safer for people.
So I think that has to be figured into the paradox as well.
All right.
So sadly, we've not seen the worst of this yet.
Trump's administration is currently in the process of replacing ICE leadership with customs and border patrol officials so as to keep upping the number of arrests and deploying more brutal militarized tactics.
One such now high-profile customs and border patrol official, many people will have seen in the news, Gregory Bovino, was brought up before Judge Sarah Ellis in Chicago for his actions that disrupted a kid's Halloween parade last weekend, which the judge pointed out was no threat to anyone by throwing tear gas canisters at neighbors trying to intervene in the arrest of a man who was doing landscaping work on that block.
The judge issued a restraining order on agents using aggressive tactics against protesters and ordered them to wear body cams and have them turned on.
She also told Bovino to meet with Her every weeknight during what DHS was calling Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago to brief her on their activities.
And this is that operation that included the Black Hawk helicopter apartment complex raid that happened on September 30th.
Judge Ellis's order, though, was paused last Tuesday by a Seventh Circuit Court.
And this is what we're up against.
And we can thank Leonard Leo for this bullshit.
Following a bizarre promo video that was posted by the DHS, made up of Bovino in very fast-cut montage, acting and looking about as Nazi-like as possible, overlaid with frenetic and triumphal instrumental remix tones of Cold Play's Viva Levita, which some will remember has lyrics about, you know, when I ruled the world, Roman cavalry and choirs singing.
So they were sort of your.
Did Chris Martin send a cease and desist?
I don't know.
I haven't seen anything about that.
You know, the Bovino thing is like he really has dressed up like he's on the set of Inglorious Bastards or something like that.
Oh, totally, totally.
He's got the very severe haircut, and then he's wearing the big old trench coat.
And it's super self-conscious.
I also want to know whether since they've made this switch over to Customs and Border Patrol because they realize that a lot of ICE agents are actually losers.
Do the ICE guys keep their $50,000 signing bonus if they're going to be doing less stuff?
On the resistance side, I have to give a shout out here to Kat Abu Ghazale.
She's the 26-year-old Palestinian-American online journalist who's running for Congress as a progressive Democrat in Illinois' 9th District.
She's eschewing all corporate donations in favor of grassroots support, and she's working with local mutual aid groups as part of her campaign.
On September 19th, Abu Ghazale was thrown to the ground by a CBP officer.
This is one of these Border Patrol guys, during a protest outside the Broadview ICE facility.
There's also a video online of her being helped by compatriots after having been hit in the face by a baton.
Her courage as a quite physically small person standing in the front line and pushing back against state thugs twice her size really comes across in the video.
And as she said in interviews, I'm a five-foot-tall, 110-pound woman who's been thrown to the ground three times now by ICE.
She keeps getting back up.
Now she's actually been charged alongside three other local Democrat leaders of impeding and hindering a federal agent in what she's describing as a political prosecution.
And they've all vowed to fight on politically and legally.
I think this is a really important moment because Abu Ghazala is pulling tied first for her upcoming primary against an older guard Democratic field.
So I'm personally going to be watching for whether she gets much support in this political persecution from the party because I think that will give a sign for me of like how much fight they have or that people like her can actually inspire in the larger structure.
I haven't seen any commentary from the real higher up leadership of the party, but yesterday I did notice that everyone that she's running against on the Democrat side in that area all spoke out in her favor, all came out.
Oh, that's great.
Yeah, this is absolutely unacceptable.
We're running against her, but we support her in this unconstitutional, you know, politically motivated persecution.
So mutual aid as a concept goes way back.
And so I want to flag those origins briefly and then connect it to the organizational feats of the Mom Donnie campaign, which is ending today as we record.
New Yorkers are out and voting.
So we don't know as of this moment what the outcome is, but it's looking like he will be mayor.
And I think there's a mutual aid story in there.
And then I'm going to finish up by linking that campaign energy to the expression of autonomy he issued in his forceful rejection of Islamophobia on behalf of the million residents, Muslim residents of New York City and everybody else in the country as well.
We've spent a lot of breath over the years covering the social Darwinism stuff that pervades the right-leaning manosphere and potosphere.
But the guy who first popularized the concept of mutual aid was fighting back against exactly this idea 150 years ago.
And it's an interesting story.
Can you do edit?
Peter Kropotkin was a dropout aristocrat turned anarchist who sought quiet military posts in eastern Siberia in the 1860s because he wanted to teach himself biology by basically wandering through the forests for years and observing the cooperation of various species.
So he watched wolves, he watched birds and crabs.
He also watched how rural villagers in harsh environments cooperated with each other.
And he did this over a long period of time.
He took like copious notes, filled notebooks and notebooks, brought them back to London.
And years later, he's reading Darwin's Inheritors.
And he grasps that his field notes refute the emerging theories of social Darwinism.
He's very interested in biology, and he sees that there's this sort of social application that's cropped up, and he realizes that he's got all this research that really debunks it.
So he writes this book in 1902 called Mutual Aid.
And he writes that the followers of Darwin, quote, reduced the notion of struggle for existence to its narrowest limits.
They came to conceive the animal world as a world of perpetual struggle among half-starved individuals thirsting for one another's blood.
They, quote, raised the pitiless struggle for personal advantages to the height of a biological principle which man must submit to as well under the menace of otherwise succumbing in a world based upon mutual extermination, unquote.
So he could be talking about anyone, you know, right of center today from Jordan Peterson, you know, who's possibly currently succumbing to his own all-beef diet, all the way to Andrew Tate.
And the upshot of Kropotkin's work is his definition of mutual aid, which is, quote, the close dependency of everyone's happiness upon the happiness of all and of the sense of justice or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own.
Now, these days, and this is unsurprising for his work being 150 years old, Kropotkin's largely self-taught science is viewed as only partially complete and ideologically biased to de-emphasize competition and aggression as evolutionary drivers.
But most people also acknowledge that it was a needed corrective to the competition-only views downstream in many fields from Darwin.
And I think it's good to remember Kropotkin because to my eye, there are two main levels to the inspiring responses to street violence and spontaneous food sharing and food banking that we've been talking about.
And the first is that people jump in at a crisis point and they get things to work when lives are at stake.
But secondly, by doing that, everybody gets to see what works and what might be possible.
And in that second point, we might even be able to take the scientific approach that Kropotkin attempted, which is to really study and celebrate the ways in which cooperation is a basic human skill to prove that it works and how and under what conditions and where it fails and maybe start a rash of podcasts about optimizing mutual aid instead of like body optimization or something like that.
And I think it's an important conspiratuality topic going forward because the social Darwinism aspect of the influencer sphere we cover is a powerful, powerful strain of misinformation.
And, you know, these current conditions that we have are horrible, but they're also kind of elaboratory.
I'm glad you said followers of Darwin, because I think that's a misunderstood point, because Darwin himself had nothing to do with social Darwinism.
Right.
And it actually doesn't reflect his views at all.
The concept behind the term is from Herbert Spencer, who coined survival of the fittest, something Darwin didn't even write in the first edition of On the Origins of Species.
He did include it in the fifth edition eventually.
And Darwin did write about natural selection.
Competition is part of it, so you can't overlook that.
But he also felt that social instincts like sympathy and cooperation were equally important.
So he wrote a follow-up book to On the Origin, and it was called The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex.
Darwin argued that beauty was as important a driver of evolution as competition.
Now, perhaps unsurprisingly, the entire male-dominated field of biology ignored that line of thinking for quite some time.
I'm going to suggest the ornithologist Richard Prun's book, The Evolution of Beauty, for anyone who wants to better understand Darwin's always-evolving views on evolution.
Darwin died unsatisfied with his ideas because he didn't think they fully captured everything involved.
That's the best intellectual, right?
Yeah.
It's like, it's like, oh, God, I didn't fucking do it.
I didn't.
Oh, God.
Yeah, because too many people think things like social Darwinism is part of his own belief system.
And that was where he drew the line.
He absolutely did not.
But as you flagged with Tate, and I mean, Joe Rogan is big on this too.
The bro podcast sphere has latched onto the competition angle as the be-all end-all, which again, while partially true, doesn't even come close to fully explaining how we evolved as animals.
It's also just this glaring category error that people on both sides of that social Darwinism debate make, right?
Where somehow the is-ness of what is being described in a scientific inquiry gets misinterpreted as a series of ought statements about, well, if this is how evolution functions, then that means it's the right thing.
And that means it's the inevitable nature of reality.
And that means, you know, there's nothing we can do about it, or that somehow having a moral objection to certain aspects of it within our human societies is doomed to failure or is denying reality.
And isn't it so ironic that the impetus behind the social Darwinist sort of bro podcaster sphere is self-optimization within this very fatalistic sphere, right?
It's like competition is exactly how things are.
Competition is exactly how things are.
So we better work, like we can't change it, but we better work harder.
We better optimize ourselves within this thing that we can't actually change.
We have to change ourselves, not the thing that we're in.
Did you say broke podcasters?
Maybe.
No, broke.
I thought you said, but it sounded like broke.
And that was actually a good, I might steal that.
I mean, you know, financially they're not broke, but morally they are.
That's yeah, it's it's an interesting that there's so many ironies there, right?
One of them, too, is that a lot of these, I don't know that they're necessarily would describe themselves as social Darwinists.
They borrow heavily from evolutionary psychology and they're quick to like draw on anything that has to do with evolution if they think it explains anything about their worldview.
But one of the hallmarks we've noticed over the last couple of years of the bro podcast sphere is it's increasingly open to Christianity.
Right.
So they draw on those metaphysical explanations for the world and humanity as well.
Well, that's what happens when you can't argue for the evolution of morals, which is part of Darwin's theories is trying to understand how morals evolve as well.
But when you have a metaphysics of something like Christianity, you could just say it started here and that was it and it was laid down.
So it doesn't make you have to think too hard.
Yeah.
And the big mistake there is usually to say, well, you know, science can't explain anything about human emotions or love or, you know, why, whatever, like the purpose or meaning.
And so therefore, metaphysics fills the gap.
So just back to Kropotkin and his legacy a little bit.
You know, you can do the cafe soup kitchen.
You can transform your front yard tree library boxes into pantries full of canned food.
Those have been popping up in Portland, right, Derek?
People have been turning their libraries into like pantries.
They've been doing that for a long time for the homeless population.
So that's actually not new.
Yeah.
This organization of watch patrols against ICE, that's coming to the fore.
You can train in anti-fascist fight clubs.
You might have to like figure out where they actually are.
A lot of them don't advertise.
The first rule, by the way.
Yeah.
The first rule of anti-fascist fight clubs.
You don't say where it is.
Yeah.
The perennial stress in anarchist theory, however, is around what happens when you want to organize and administrate these principles at the level of the state.
And that stress begins with the anarchist principle that mutual aid is mandatory because one ultimately cannot depend on the state to provide for or the police to protect people outside of the elite or the ownership classes.
So Kropotkin argued that the state historically destroyed and undermined organic forms of mutual support because it centralized authority and replaced communal institutions with bureaucratic control.
You know, I'm fascinated by history and evolution.
And since that's on the topic, what state does he identify as first destroying these systems of disport?
Because I always find the term kind of nebulous without those specifics.
And different trading systems were developed by different forms of government across the planet for thousands of years.
Yeah, it's a great question.
I think when you think, when you hear today leftists use the word state, 99% of the time they are following either Kropotkin anarchism or Marxist schools that have this idea of the same historical construct,
that the modern post-feudal nation state that's characterized by laws, bureaucratic processes, legislative bodies, institutionalized authority that emerges alongside capitalism in the 18th century, like that's the state, the modern nation state.
So just from a historical perspective, because I mean, I don't, obviously I've said this before, I don't study Marx, but in terms of history, so they don't really go deeper than European history because they're not looking at the Ottomans or the Aztecs or the Egyptians or the Chinese and the sort of authoritarian systems that were formed then and how they evolved and spread across.
It's very specific to this one domain.
Well, I think the analysis really gets going within that domain.
And I'm not sure to the extent to which Marx studies other cultures, but he does have extensive theories of like primitive capital or primitive accumulation or the transition between one state to the other and how capitalism emerges around this particular time period.
I don't think there's a lot of cross-cultural study, though.
But I'm not sure.
Okay, so specific to Europe.
Yeah, it is specific to Europe.
Currency systems are global.
Right.
And the argument is not that we should return to a feudal system.
And it's not even that we've taken a wrong turn into capitalism because there's a kind of inevitable process that's happening that all societies move through, right?
A Hegelian kind of thing.
That confers immense benefits to begin with and then plays itself out historically.
It consumes itself in some way.
But I mean, with regard to the state, Marx and the anarchists see things a little bit differently.
Like Marx sees the state primarily as an instrument created by the capitalist class to contain and manage class conflict and manage the economic order.
And it's potentially, therefore, used as a transitional tool by the workers.
So when you talk about the, you know, the dictatorship of the proletarian, it's like the point at which the working class actually takes over the mechanism of state before the state withers away in some future time.
But Kropotkin, as an anarchist, sees the state as an inherently oppressive mechanism of domination that's inseparable from capitalism and it requires abolition rather than reform or even transitional use.
But they are basically taking the modern liberal conception, the positive conception of the state as a necessary institution that protects individual freedom, you know, rights, including property rights and the rule of law.
And they're flipping it.
They're saying, no, its actual purpose is to protect the operation of capital.
That's the perspective.
And so, you know, Kropotkin says mutual aid is necessary because the function of the state is to do the opposite.
So he sees the state, Derek, as kind of like a forced replacement of the kinship or community care and organization structures that have been running things prior.
And so that puts mutual aid in a very stark historical context.
Like we're talking about, you know, cafes offering food and that being like a really beautiful, generous thing to do.
But it's like there's a thorn in there, which is like, you know, we're doing this because the superstructure is probably always going to fail us.
I'm not saying that's what Heretic is doing, but like that's embedded in the principle of mutual aid.
Well, what you're talking about brings up, because just a moment ago, I was saying about how social Darwinism has nothing to do with Darwin.
And it seems like Kropotkin's analysis on capitalism and what is happening isn't really true to what Adam Smith wanted, because Adam Smith wanted the state to intervene when it comes to actual some level of social services, because the whole idea of competition was to get out of mercantilism and feudalism and to create more competition, but it was never to actually starve people.
He wanted intervention in education, in certain services.
Well, what happened after that time were some people, like business owners, just took that and then decided to do what they did with it.
So you're saying, Derek, that pure capitalism has never really been tried.
That is actually true.
We need a purity test for our capitalisms.
Anyway, along comes Mamdani.
And, you know, this is somebody who's committed to the state, to a better state.
And he brings socialist policies that are intermingled with strands of mutual aid sentiment.
And, you know, centralized planning over housing or groceries is a pathway towards a better state.
And I think that we see his, we have to do this ourselves outside of normal pathways as a kind of mutual aid independence part operating at the level of organizing.
So, you know, famously, his campaign recruited 50,000 volunteers through town halls and the DSA.
And just by contrast, there was a video on my feed about how Cuomo had to pay like young people $35 an hour to stand on the corner and hand out pamphlets, but they didn't really want to do it.
Like this one guy was like, he was just sort of standing there holding the pamphlets and like looking sheepish.
The guy who was approached by a Momdani volunteer, right?
Oh, there was a video of a girl who went up and found a Cuomo and she was filming him and she goes, oh, you're getting paid to do this.
I'm not.
And they actually laughed about it.
It was fantastic.
So those volunteers knocked on, this is their self-report or the organization's report, knocked on 1.6 million doors.
They organized community events.
You know, these are all actions that are like a prefigurative politics.
They prefigure socialist policy.
Like if we were all going to do things together, this is how we would start doing it.
We would make the process part of the outcome.
And so the campaign cooperatively collectivizes a kind of political agency.
And that's in line with the policy promises, freezing rent, universal childcare, free public buses, 200,000 affordable housing units, a $30 minimum wage by 2030.
Making all of those things happen and undoubtedly failing at some, maybe even most of them, will expose the fault line between Kropotkin anti-state Marxists and what leaders in capitalism have to do if they're not overturning it over altogether.
Like for anarchists, the problem begins with the will to leadership itself, as opposed to always working locally and collectively.
Like anybody who wants to be mayor gets the side eye.
It's like, what are you actually going to do with that power?
So those arguments between socialists and communists and anarchists are going to go on forever.
But it is clear, to me at least, that Mamdani and his organization draw on these notions of mutual aid and on its socialist implications.
And he's kept it toned down recently, but he was out there not too long ago saying, my platform is that every single person should, this is a direct quote, every single person should have housing.
If there was any system that could guarantee each person housing, whether you call it the abolition of private property or you call it, you know, just a statewide housing guarantee, it is preferable to what is going on right now.
So the Momdani campaign is banging at this brick wall of capitalist sort of destiny and realism and attempting to change really dominant narratives around the affordability and effectiveness of socialist policy.
And yet at the same time, the very act of him standing up and saying those things marks him as someone who has, you know, that that sort who's sort of been contaminated by the desire to be a leader under capitalism.
How so?
Like, he's standing up and...
He's advocating for policies that he would apply or work towards as a leader.
And even like wanting to be a leader is he's violating sort of some aspects of anarchistic or communist ethos.
No, no, not.
He's violating.
He's violating.
He's disturbing the sort of anarchist line on leadership for sure.
But socialists or communists don't have any problem with leadership.
It's just about the direction it goes in.
So he's doing all of this while banging at another towering barrier built by misinformation and bigotry dating back decades.
So on October the 23rd, this is two weeks out from today, Andrew Cuomo phoned into the conservative WABC radio show called Sid Rosenberg and Friends in the Morning.
People's lives are at stake.
God forbid another 9-11.
Can you imagine Mamdhami in the seat?
I could.
He'd be cheering.
It's another problem.
Okay, so that other problem that Cuomo is talking about isn't real, though.
Like what these ghouls are doing is they're resurrecting the, oh yeah, there were thousands of Muslims celebrating 9-11 by dancing as the smoke blackened the sky story.
But that didn't happen.
But it's still a persistent lie in right-wing culture built on the weaponization of 9-11 trauma.
And it's impacted Mamdani's life and the life of Muslims in New York ever since.
And the thing about even then, that was said by Trump, and he specifically said he could see them in Jersey City.
Where I lived in Jersey City was the fallout shelter for 9-11.
It is exactly where he was pointing to.
And I was there.
There was no one dancing for a long time there.
So that one always fucking got me.
So this same week, after endorsing Cuomo, Eric Adams comes out and says, New York can't be Europe.
I don't know what's wrong with people.
You see what's playing out in other countries because of Islamic extremism.
Then in the final debate, the cat guy, Curtis Liwa, accused Mamdani of supporting global jihad.
Now, there's a long history behind this reckless willingness to stereotype, to make a virtue of ignorance, to think it's like some kind of brave, anti-woke thing to say on national TV that Islam is the motherload of bad ideas or to beat the drum towards war in the Middle East.
To do all of this and to know nothing about like older religious commandments to share resources or the modern Islamic socialism that rose up in response to colonialism that somebody like Mamdani's dad has spent years writing about, or like why Mamdani calls every female relative or even neighbor his auntie.
So his flailing opponents are covering themselves in shit.
And Mamdani comes out and stands on the steps of the Islamic Cultural Center in the South Bronx and he delivers this speech that is about way more than his campaign.
It's about how the city's 750,000 Muslims have had to live with their heads down in the shadows and how that was finally going to change.
So he starts by relating about how six years prior when he ran for state assembly, an older Muslim uncle, so not family related, suggested gently to him that things would be safer and might go better for him if he didn't foreground his Muslim identity.
Like you don't have to say that you're Muslim.
You don't have to make this a focal point.
And then going through his campaign, Mamdani said he understood why that was told to him, given the constant stream of bigotry thrown at him, like political cartoons depicting his campaign as a 9-11 plane, and then constant accusations of anti-Semitism because he's anti-genocide, all built on versions of, you know, the Muslim is not trustworthy.
But here's how he finished the speech.
He said, will we remain in the shadows or will we together step into the light?
There are 12 days remaining until election day.
I will be a Muslim man in New York City each of those 12 days.
And every day that follows after that, I will not change who am, how I eat, or the faith that I am proud to call my own.
But there is one thing that I will change.
I will no longer look for myself in the shadows.
I will find myself in the light.
So first of all, top tier political writing.
And in addition to reshaping how Muslims in New York City and maybe beyond will be engaged and collaborated with going forward, I think the Venn diagram between his full-chest claim to dignity here and the politics of mutual aid arising in response to fascism is pretty much a circle to me because one of the first things that I think people have to get about organizing locally against racist violence
or, you know, the Gestapo or ICE is the feeling that they can actually do it and that they can feel their own dignity and that they can share it and encourage others to do that as well.
And most importantly, that they have to because the dominant culture won't do it for them.
And so he's talking to his 750,000 Muslim neighbors in the city.
But I think that combined with wealth sharing promises, he's also speaking to people who no longer want to hesitate on creating care structures for when the government isn't working or when it falls apart, or as Kropotkin worried,
